AdamSmith

‘got stuck’? Hoover froze in place for months while the economy collapsed. FDR when elected got un-stuck right quick and started trying this, that and the other thing until some of them started working.

And Hoover, etc etc. Yet we have come through.

There is some contemporary scholarly thought that his losing his temper and kicking over the obscene money-lenders’ tables in the Temple is what triggered the Jewish establishment to come after him and have him strung up. Of course there is no ‘archeological’ evidence after 2000 years.

I used to think that. But the very detailed and strange Markan Gospel, and the probably lost precursor works such as the Q Gospel as well as the multiply corroborated Sayings gospels, found in the caves outside the Mediterranean, suggest from contemporary evidence there probably was some very strange Hebrew prophet moving around his world upsetting the existing order at that time. In ways that would have made his own authorities want to be rid of him. To avoid drawing down trouble from their Roman governors. https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Jesus-Mediterranean-Jewish-Peasant/dp/0060616296https

Spent a semester in a poetry-writing seminar with this wonderful man, James Applewhite... Quartet for Three Voices By James Applewhite '58, A.M. '60, Ph.D. '69. Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 64 pages. $22.95. When Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul came from England in the late 1980s to tour the American South, he selected a certain quiet, unassuming man to take him around North Carolina. Naipaul wanted someone who could show him the farms, churches, graveyards, and universities, and explain the history of the land. The man Naipaul chose had grown up on a Carolina tobacco farm, like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him; he had become a poet, and had gone on to become a celebrated professor of English at Duke University. Naipaul documented his wanderings with James Applewhite in his book A Turn in the South. He describes Applewhite with great affection: "He was a slender man, narrow-waisted, concerned about exercise. He took all my inquiries seriously, and spoke from the heart, without affectation, with a farmer's matter-of-factness, offering me at once, as soon as he saw that I was receptive, thoughts he would have spent some time arriving at." Naipaul repeatedly marvels at how much he and Applewhite have in common, though they come from such different worlds. Each feels alienated from his homeland--the far-off island of Trinidad and the leafy, hot Carolina farm--and each uses his writing to examine the beauty and evils of the past and the drastic changes this century has witnessed. Toward the end of A Turn in the South, Naipaul calls his conversations with Applewhite "extraordinary." What was it about this narrow-waisted Jim Applewhite that so deeply moved V.S. Naipaul? One only need turn to Applewhite's latest volume of poems, Quartet for Three Voices. His lucid and haunting poetry reflects upon the history of North Carolina and the history of his own family, which once owned slaves: "Accepting its sweetness and bitter illusions/I've lived four-fifths of my life in this South/that believed in a lie we all still suffer for." Applewhite's poems vividly recollect the delights of the South and the joys of his childhood, but often with a dark edge: "we suck on/apples of fallen orchards." The fallen orchards represent a favorite theme of Quartet for Three Voices--people and places aging and decaying over time. In the standout poem "A Fictive World," Applewhite grapples with the memory of his grandparents who "disbelieved change" and didn't want to admit they were growing old. He recalls his grandfather singing "Sunrise Tomorrow" even as he was close to death, and how nothing ever changed inside their house: "the celery, deviled eggs,/pickles and olives in narrower and wider dishes, iced/tea in cut-glass goblets on stems, the turkey sliced on/the sideboard by old Aunt Eliza." The deviled eggs, the goblets, the hymns: it was all comforting, but it also meant hiding from the real world, telling "lies/against time." Applewhite believes in telling the truth--acknowledging change and learning from the past: "The history I breathe is alive, exists to save." No poem addresses this hope more directly than "The Deed," the best poem of the collection, with its fresh imagery and an honest reckoning of the past. In it, Applewhite has decided to sell his family's farm, which leads him to remember its long history. Rich musical language describes the farm's boundaries--"Beginning at Toisnot Swamp then/southwest for eighty-six chains," as well as the surface of the land--"scrub oak and blackberry tangle" and "loblolly pine." In a dark and brilliant image, he recalls "the swamp-stream switching its channels/like a snake when you chop its head off, twisting in dirt." Applewhite confronts his farm's mixed history by intoning a litany of names. On paper, the farm has been transmitted to "John, Martha, Elisha,/and Isaac," but he remembers another string of names, "Beedy, Lewis, Offy;/Wealthy, Feruba, Bright; Tabitha/Mereca, Jinnna, and Litha," the slaves who lived and worked on this land. He writes their names in his poem hoping their "story will last," even though, over the years, fires burned through the farm's cemetery and "erased whatever chalked letters/once named you on the blackened/boards of heart pine." He sells the farm, lays aside his guilt over its history, and ends the poem with an image of hope, the fields feathered with broomsedge and "preparing/for the new generations of pines." Applewhite's rich and lyrical poetry does the same work as the fertile broomsedge, preparing a new generation of readers for growth. The poems in Quartet for Three Voices brim with wisdom and insight as he reflects on the past century, both recording history in his poems and bringing a new understanding of the past. "Now/I know only backwardly," he declares, but these years of experience in the hands of a masterful poet make for extraordinary and powerful writing. Martin, a freelance book reviewer, works for Random House. https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/james-applewhite

Ah! Now the video works. Wonderful.

This does not replay.

Repost, IIR: Nikki Haley: Tillerson and Kelly tried to block Trump to 'save country' https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/10/nikki-haley-book-tillerson-kelly-trump

Worth yet another repost in these distanced times.

I never get tired of this...

Ah! Recovered memory. David as a frosh came flouncing up to me onetime outside Cross Campus Library and spouted excitedly, “I just realized the opening lines of The Waste Land are a reference to those of The Canterbury Tales’.” I suppose it shows my own immaturity that I replied, “Yes, well, that is one of the more obvious references.”

HOME / CANTERBURY TALES / TEXT AND TRANSLATIONS / 1.1 General Prologue The Middle English text is from Larry D. Benson., Gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, Houghton-Mifflin Company; used with permission of the publisher. 1 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote When April with its sweet-smelling showers 2 The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, Has pierced the drought of March to the root, 3 And bathed every veyne in swich licour And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid 4 Of which vertu engendred is the flour; By which power the flower is created; 5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth When the West Wind also with its sweet breath, 6 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth In every wood and field has breathed life into 7 The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne The tender new leaves, and the young sun 8 Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, Has run half its course in Aries, 9 And smale foweles maken melodye, And small fowls make melody, 10 That slepen al the nyght with open ye Those that sleep all the night with open eyes 11 (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages), (So Nature incites them in their hearts), 12 Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, Then folk long to go on pilgrimages, 13 And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores, 14 To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; To distant shrines, known in various lands; 15 And specially from every shires ende And specially from every shire's end 16 Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, Of England to Canterbury they travel, 17 The hooly blisful martir for to seke, To seek the holy blessed martyr, 18 That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

The Waste Land BY T. S. ELIOT FOR EZRA POUND IL MIGLIOR FABBRO I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land

Very warm welcome here. Your voice and thoughts have always been valued.

The ultimate torture. I got my BA in 1981. It was like the Middle Ages technologically. To hand in my 40-page senior thesis, I spent 2 nights on the floor physically cutting & repasting typed sections so they would flow & connect better.

P.S. One knew David when he was a freshman and I a senior at that joint in New Haven. I shall have to go through the now fast-fading memory banks & retrieve some jewels.

In my 2 years as undergraduate at Duke, then a transfer to Yale (1977-1981 in toto ), almost all the term grade was based on the mid-term paper (maybe a few others), then the final paper. A few courses, but few enough you could avoid them, graded significantly on an in-person final exam. In 3rd and 4th year at Jale I did not have to take a single one. Just these big papers they required. And participation in seminar, which was a lot easier than sitting down to the electric typewriter (as what we had then in the Dark Ages ).

And I think possibly he and Zora Neale Hurston were on the level of Faulkner, who also saw through all that evil.

Because I could not stop for Death – (479) Launch Audio in a New Window BY EMILY DICKINSON Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and Chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle – We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground – Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could-not-stop-for-death-479

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/oration-in-memory-of-abraham-lincoln/

Returning to the topic (as if there were any such thing here ), this is worth watching again and again. And then going to (re-)read all Baldwin’s works.

...Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, district engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote of Groves: "First, General Groves is the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for. He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organizational channels. He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make timely, difficult decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know. He knows he is right and so sticks by his decision. He abounds with energy and expects everyone to work as hard, or even harder, than he does... if I had to do my part of the atomic bomb project over again and had the privilege of picking my boss, I would pick General Groves." Groves' biographer, Robert S. Norris, dubbed Groves "The Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man." https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/leslie-r-groves